Bi-Weekly Talk: Stephan Zieger: Identifying and Reducing Performance Uncertainty in UK Railway Timetables

Wednesday, October 16, 2019, 10:30am

Location: RWTH Aachen University, Department of Computer Science - Ahornstr. 55, building E3, room 9u10

Speaker: Stephan Zieger

 

Preliminary and ongoing research in cooperation with Transportation Research Group from University of Southampton is presented. With increasing levels of traffic, the likelihood of delay transmission between trains increases drastically. Decreasing the risk of large delay transmissions within the network requires among other means a feasible, robust and stable timetable. In the UK, Timetable Planning Rules (TPR) are used to construct the annual timetable. However, compliance with the TPRs does not guarantee robustness, and even worse, neither feasibility.

Train delays are recorded in certain Timing Point Locations and attributed for delays exceeding 3 minutes. Hence, smaller timetable feasibility problems are often not investigated further. We used a train delay data set provided by Network Rail to identify timetable-induced delays as well as stations and sections in the network especially vulnerable to delays and eventually to help improving the Timetable Planning Rules. The talk will give an idea of the section and dwell time delays in the south-west of England and further insights for an exemplary station and a section will be presented. Finally, an outlook for the planned extension will be discussed.